YouTube is yet another Google cash-cow the Internet's foremost repository of videos that end up as TV news filler items. Credited as one of the driving forces of Web 2.0, it makes readily available many copyright-infringing music videos, annoying would-be music or comedy acts, and stupid home videos — which for some reason received more than ten million downloads.

YouTube allows for free expression in discussion of these videos, where people can either post their own video in reply or leave a comment under it. But if you are looking for meaningful exchange of ideas, there are a few problems:

Video uploaders may remove certain comments, or disable comments altogether, if they don't like the ones they are getting. (Is this really a problem, though? See #2 below.)

Some commenters don't even read the refutations you give them, and keep rambling on about what you refuted three comments ago. God forbid they actually learn something.

Popular videos attract high numbers of comments, leading to very low signal-to-noise ratios.

Up until late 2013, serious discussion of videos was also hampered by the technical characteristics of the system itself: a 500 character limit and a clumsy reading interface, lacking crucial 1980s innovations such as proper threads. It's too soon to say whether the established commenting culture will be changed by the merger with Google+, but since YouTube also has next to no moderation, it's unlikely.

As well as posting LOL comments, registered users can rate videos (assuming the author has not disabled ratings). These ratings can serve as an indication of the quality popularity of any given video — comparable to movie ratings. Who but the most die-hard zombie fan will stay up until 4am in order to watch a highly down-voted movie? The ratings system is somewhat subjective, since viewers can rate based purely on personal tastes or support of claims/beliefs made in a video. It's mobocracy which obviously breaks down when users aren't as clever and attractive as you!

YouTube provides two methods by which users can reduce the visibility (and presumably the popularity) of videos. The first is to flag it as being unsuitable for minors, since a sufficient number of "votes" will hide the video from everyone except registered users of an appropriate age. The second approach is to vote-down a video (using the ratings system mentioned earlier in this article), either manually through a conspiracy of users or by using a vote bot, which is typically a script that allows a single person to register a large number of votes over multiple videos.[1] It's kind of like being able to stuff the ballot box. Vote botting has a more pronounced effect on smaller videos, since there are likely to be fewer genuine votes to counteract the effects of the vote botting.

Some authors respond to the problem of vote bots by asking their viewers to register votes to counteract the effects of vote botting. This approach could arguably result in mundane videos being voted-up simply because people agree with the views of the author.

A vote-bot is a script which runs by a computer (or several, or possibly even ones that have been hijacked) and thus has very predictable behavior. In March 2008, YouTube released Insight, an analytical tool for YouTube accounts to track the views of their videos. This has been used with quite high success in spotting the predictable activity of a bot. Specifically, when a vote-bot script executes, it tends to operate only for a short period of time - perhaps a few hours to a day at most - registering dozens, if not hundreds of accounts. All these accounts will then "watch" a selected video and give it an up vote or possibly a down vote, although it's not sure how common this kind of "up-voting" is. Insight then allows a user to view if this has happened as the graphical data produced will show a large, clear spike in the number of votes, well above the normal base line of voting activity, for the duration of the script's execution. A corresponding spike, equally above the base line, in the record of down votes will also appear. These spikes are usually many, many times above the baseline activity and are usually much higher than any "natural" spikes.[2]

The "hotspots" option, which tracks how much of the video, and what parts of the video, has been watched may also show a notable dip at the beginning due the bot being there only to register the vote and not actually watching the video. However, this would only be expected on videos with viewing figures that are small relative to the vote-bot.

Many YouTubers create videos expressing a particular political or religious viewpoint. These are then answered by others expressing contrary viewpoints — each gathering their own band of vociferous followers in various levels of coherent text. Notwithstanding the intensity of debates within the YouTube medium, it is unlikely that these debates have much (or indeed any) influence on the outside world, unless they happen to go viral.

A number of people who actually bother to vote and leave comments on YouTube, however, seem to lean toward the political hard-right (see section below). For example, YouTube has become one of the most popular outlets for Austrian School advocates to use to reach the "sheeple", such is the case with EconStories.tv and countless other libertarian advocates.

Bizarrely enough it is not uncommon to see these positions combined with anti-theism, as New Atheism is fairly popular on the site. Then again, YouTube users aren't one monolithic group, and fundamentalists aren't exactly uncommon either.

Numerous other websites now host free video content, often specified around themes. There's Tangle (aka. GodTube), a Christian-themed video site[4] and PopModal, the Republican (or "pro-American") answer to YouTube,[5][6] a whole slew of pornographic YouTube clones (RedTube, YouPorn, Pornotube, etc.)[7] and dozens more that should really be mentioned but would take a while to track down. It's interesting to note how many of these sites actually just stream YouTube's content; clearly bandwidth and server space are totally non-partisan.

Conspiracy theorists, not being able to get their ideas on the mainstream media, rely on YouTube to get their ideas to the world. The problem is their videos are usually well received and people debunking these theories are spread few and far in between. If you look at most of their videos, their titles are usually misleading. For example, if it says KAY PERRY AMITS SHE SOLD HER SOUL TO THE DEVIL", the speech is usually taken out of context. If it shows something like "Scientists expose chemtrails", then the speeches are usually edited.[8]

Many titles are deliberately misleading on YouTube, in that it gets the author more hits. A conspiracy theorist can make a video titles "BARACK OBAMA TOLD BY THE ILLUMINATI ABOUT CHEMTRAILS - CAUGHT ON TAPE", and when you click it, you get a series of out of context news reports, portions of alleged documents, etc. with nothing to do with the title. [9]

Yep, they finally ran out of stuff to cry about, and now they're attacking their own haven.[10] Needless to say, YouTube has so many videos about the Illuminati, it's hard to comprehend people even believe this. Wouldn't they, er... remove the videos? Or better yet, close down YouTube and get rid of the entire problem?[11]

↑ Natural spikes in activity are, of course, expected to happen with YouTube videos (say, if the video was posted to a popular blog and its views were boosted for a day or two) but these aren't usually accompanied with a corresponding spike in the actual rating.